Quote

Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.

Willa Cather

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Willa Cather
Age: 73 †
Born: 1873
Born: December 7
Died: 1947
Died: April 24
Author
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Willa Sibert Cather
Time
Relationships
Life
Seeking
Greedily
Half
Satisfactory
Away
Wholly
Human
Pulling
Humans
Necessity
Every
Tragic
Never
Ego

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Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.
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I tell you there is such a thing as creative hate.
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A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.
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Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.
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The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.
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Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.
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When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.
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New things are always ugly.
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Religion is different from everything else because in religion seeking is finding.
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William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.
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All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.
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Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.
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In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded.
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The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.
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Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
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Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones.
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Oh, this is the joy of the rose That it blows, And goes.
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There seemed to be nothing to see no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
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I've seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too ful of life and love. They can't help it. Poeple come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter.
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